Variety
“Vietnam”
Vietnam War
Village Music Inc.
Village Voice
Vincent, Gene
Vogue
“Voices of Old People”
Wahlberg, Mark
Walcott, Derek
Walken, Christopher
Walsh, Joe
“Wanderer, The”
Warburton, Reginald
Warner Bros.
Waronker, Lenny
Warwick, Dionne
Warwick Records
“Was a Sunny Day”
Washington, Dinah
Washington Post
“Water in My Ear”
Watermark
Waters, Muddy
Wayne, John
“We Are the World”
Weavers
Webb, Charles
Weckl, Dave
“Wednesday Morning A.M.”
Wednesday Morning AM
Weiner, Mark
Weinstein, Paula
Weiss, Gene
Welch, Gillian
Welk, Lawrence
Wemar Music
Wenner, Jann
“We Shall Overcome”
West, Stanley
West Side Story (musical)
“We’ve Got a Groovy Thing Goin’”
“What a Wonderful World”
“What I Am”
“When Numbers Get Serious”
“Whispering Bells”
White, Timothy
White Album
Who, the
“Why Don’t You Write Me”
“Why Must I Be a Teenager in Love”
“Wild Flower”
Wild Thornberrys, The (film)
William Morris agency
Williams, Robin
Wilson, Brian
Wilson, Dave
Wilson, Kim
Wilson, Tom
Winningham, Mare
WINS-AM radio
Winter, Johnny
Winter Festival for Peace
Wood, Graham
Woodley, Bruce
Workers’ Music Association
Wright, Frank Lloyd
Wright, Gene
“Wristband”
Yale, Arthur
Yarrow, Peter
Yetnikoff, Walter
“You Baby You”
“You Can Call Me Al”
“You Can Tell the World”
“You’ll Never Walk Alone”
Young, Neil
Young, Robert
Young Frankenstein (film)
“You’re Kind”
You’re the One
Zaks, Jerry
Zappa, Frank
Zimbabwe
Louis and Belle Simon in later years. “My father is the person who most influenced my thinking and my life,” Paul said.
At the height of “Hey, Schoolgirl,” old friends and new pop sensations.
Tom and Jerry, in their red jackets, white shirts, and black bow ties, rocking a homecoming dance, circa 1958.
The guitar-thumpin’ camp counselor, summer 1958 at Camp Washington Lodge, Long Island, New York.
Forest Hills High School, class of 1958.
When Paul (right corner, with guitar) took control of Alpha Epsilon Pi’s Follies entries, the fraternity won the Queens College competition every year.
During his senior year Paul (first row, second from left) was the president of Queens College’s chapter of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity.
When Paul Simon finished class at Queens College, Jerry Landis pursued his music career in the recording studios of Midtown Manhattan. Seen here with ex–Queens College student Carol Klein, better known as Carole King.
After graduating college Paul went to law school. He wouldn’t stay very long.
Relocating to London, Paul steadily built a following in folk clubs all over the British Isles.
Reunited as the folk duo Simon and Garfunkel, Paul and Artie juggled their ambitions and identities.
Established in the Greenwich Village music scene, Paul launched a folk-focused song publishing company with musician Barry Kornfeld.
After “The Sound of Silence” made Simon and Garfunkel into stars, Paul’s appearance evolved to fit his new status.
Paul and Artie, backstage in the mid-1960s, worked together to make their albums and shows as perfect as possible.
As Simon and Garfunkel’s fame grew in the late 1960s, they were regarded as generational spokesmen and cultural oracles.
After the Simon and Garfunkel breakup Paul made a new life, and a family, with Peggy.
Increasingly successful as a solo performer in the 1970s, Paul made fun of his brooding reputation on Saturday Night Live.
SNL producer and new best friend Lorne Michaels (middle, with Paul on one side and George Harrison on the other) encouraged Paul to write and perform in television and movies.
By 1975 Paul and Artie were back to being friends. An attempt to collaborate again wouldn’t last.
Paul’s twelve-year relationship with Carrie Fisher was close, passionate, and ultimately devastating.
The sounds of Ladysmith Black Mambazo and South African pop music would revive Paul’s spirits, his career, and his penchant for controversy.
The Capeman premiere, January 1998. The smiles would fade when the reviews came in the morning.
ALSO BY PETER AMES CARLIN
Bruce
Paul McCartney: A Life
Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PETER AMES CARLIN is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller Bruce, a biography of Bruce Springsteen, published in 2012. Carlin has also been a freelance journalist, a senior writer at People, and a television columnist and feature writer at the Oregonian. A regular speaker on music, art, and popular culture, he lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and three children. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
1. Chapter One: Real and Assumed
2. Chapter Two: The Tailor
3. Chapter Three: Our Song
4. Chapter Four: Nowhere to Go But Up!
5. Chapter Five: Two Teenagers
6. Chapter Six: The Freedom Criers
7. Chapter Seven: What Are You Searching for, Carlos Dominguez
8. Chapter Eight: The Voice of the Now
9. Chapter Nine: He Was My Brother
10. Chapter Ten: It Means Nothing to Us
11. Chapter Eleven: Some Dream of What I Might Be
12. Chapter Twelve: Bookends
13. Chapter Thirteen: So Long Already, Artie
14. Chapter Fourteen: I’d Rather Be
15. Chapter Fifteen: That’s It, That’s That Groove
16. Chapter Sixteen: Through No Fault of My Own
17. Chapter Seventeen: Swallowed by a Song
18. Chapter Eighteen: What Did You Expect?
19. Chapter Nineteen: These Are the Roots of Rhythm
20. Chapter Twenty: I’ve Got Nothing to Apologize For
21. Chapter Twenty-One: The Whole World Whispering
22. Chapter Twenty-Two: Phantom Figures in the Dust
23. Chapter Twenty-Three: The Teacher
24. Chapter Twenty-Four: See What’s Become of Me
Notes
Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
Index
Photographs
/> Also by Peter Ames Carlin
About the Author
Copyright
HOMEWARD BOUND. Copyright © 2016 by Peter Ames Carlin. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.henryholt.com
Cover design by David Shoemaker
Cover photograph © Douglas Gilbert
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Carlin, Peter Ames, author.
Title: Homeward bound: the life of Paul Simon / Peter Ames Carlin.
Description: New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016014026 | ISBN 9781627790345 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781627790352
Subjects: LCSH: Simon, Paul, 1941- | Rock musicians—United States—Biography.
Classification: LCC ML420.S563 C37 2016 | DDC 782.42164092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016014026
Our eBooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945 ext. 5442 or by e-mail at [email protected].
e-ISBN 978-1-6277-9035-2
First Edition: November 2016
* The affidavit puts the quotation marks around “Simon and Garfunkel,” emphasizing that their surnames constitute a duly established trade name. An attorney for Prosen’s side responded: “I know of no precedent in which one would call his own legal family name an assumed name.”
* Galicia has also been claimed by Hungary and Poland over the years, fueling confusion between our Louis Simon and another Louis Simon who had played violin in the Hungarian National Orchestra before moving to the United States and joining the same musicians’ union to which Paul’s father would eventually belong.
* Much to the bemusement of younger brother Eddie, who had excelled at guitar ever since he began lessons a year or two earlier. Eddie Simon went on to teach the instrument and open his own guitar school in New York.
† A three-quarter-size sunburst steel string made by the Stadium guitar company. The guitar obviously came from Louis, and when Paul broke a string while attempting to tune the instrument, he was too embarrassed to admit it and so put the instrument back in its case and didn’t touch it for a few days. When he finally fessed up, Louis shrugged it off. Guitar strings break all the time.
* Who had reputedly coined the term rock and roll in 1951 to describe upbeat rhythm and blues songs.
* As would Darcey and Layton, who eventually moved to Nashville and become successful songwriters under their real names, Chris Gentry and Len Chiriaka.
* One detail Pizzarelli doesn’t recall was the name of the song they were working on. “But it wasn’t ‘Stardust.’ I can tell you that.”
† Ronnie grew up hearing that as a toddler he’d been bounced on the knee of Bugsy Siegel.
* Not an exaggeration. When Kooper wrangled an invitation to observe a Dylan recording session a few years later, he insinuated himself into the studio and wound up contributing the soaring organ line to “Like a Rolling Stone.” Dylan tapped Kooper to play keyboards in the group that brought electric music to the Newport Folk Festival, and Kooper played sessions with Dylan for many years after that.
* Talking about his brief Edward B. Marks era to Rolling Stone’s Nicholas Dawidoff in 2011, Paul said he agreed to let Marks publish his songs only because he felt so bad about being such a lousy salesman. Yet that’s a far-fetched interpretation, given his inability theretofore to write a hit song that wasn’t “Hey, Schoolgirl,” and even that was only a middling success. Swagger indeed, even five decades later.
* The Pilgrims included Robert Guillaume, the actor who would become quite famous on a variety of television series, including the top-rated Benson in the early 1980s.
* A large but unnoticed FUCK YOU that had been scrawled on the wall behind them had to be airbrushed from the final image.
* Songs of Earth and Sky, by Art & Paul, Columbia Records, 1960.
* Irony compounds over the years. MacColl’s love song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” which he’d written for then-paramour Peggy Seeger (half sister to Pete), became an enormous hit for popular American singer Roberta Flack. Written in 1957, the song was covered quickly by the Kingston Trio, the Chad Mitchell Singers, and other pop artists in America, but it reached an unexpected zenith when Flack’s version topped the Billboard charts for six weeks in 1972 after it was used in the Clint Eastwood–directed film Play Misty for Me.
* Here’s how that worked. After chewing out the William Morris agent, Lewis booked three nights of shows, starting with a Friday evening show at Brown University that paid $2,500. On Saturday, they went to Rensselaer Polytechnic in Troy, New York, earning $2,000 for an opening slot on a show with Little Anthony and the Imperials. But then Little Anthony never showed up, which spurred a storm of stomps, claps, and hollering from the three thousand students in the Field House, which the college’s activities director now imagined might not survive the night—not unless he could get Paul and Artie to go back and play a second set. And of course they would—as long as they got the $4,000 the school had planned to pay Little Anthony. On Sunday they got $2,500 at the State University of New York in Oneonta.
* About five weeks after Paul returned to the United States, to give you a sense of how extremely quickly it all went.
* With the help of John Lennon, according to legend.
* Both pledged to keep their friendship separate from the business disagreement, and continued to enjoy each other’s company even while giving affidavits and sitting across from each other while their respective lawyers debated the points of their case. Eventually, Paul and Kornfeld worked out a settlement and went their separate ways as friends—friends who hardly ever saw each other after that, but still.
* The actual number was just north of a million.
* “We used to have to explain that we were American,” Paul recalled in 1990. “I don’t think that it helped that I came back sort of affecting an English accent, either.”
* Both Paul and Artie called it their favorite song, not only on the album but in their entire careers. Released as a single, the tune stalled at No. 25, much to their surprise and chagrin. “It was above the kids,” Paul mused to the Record Mirror’s Norman Jopling. He revised his opinion later, conceding in 1993, “It’s a college kid’s song, a little precious.”
* Only Ravi Shankar was paid for his music; the rest worked for expenses, which some artists, frankly, stretched to outrageous extremes.
† Paul insisted that they book his British folksinger friend Beverley Martin, whose voice can be heard on “Fakin’ It” asking Mr. Leitch about his day.
* Movies starring rock ’n’ roll artists don’t count.
* For which Artie recalls writing the verse about being a Kellogg’s Corn Flake, etc.
† Hired as a producer for the Bookends sessions, John Simon was unpleasantly surprised to see his credit reduced to “production assistance” on the album credits. His predecessor Bob Johnston suffered the same fate on the songs he’d overseen, including the ones that had already been released as singles listing him as the sole producer. Asked for his feelings on the matter, John Simon shrugs. “Revisionism sucks,” he says.
* Because they were signed originally as a two-man folk act that could knock out songs in just as much time as it took to play them into the microphone, Columbia had generously agreed to cover the costs with its end of the proceeds. It hadn’t anticipated that the folk kids would mature into ambitious art rock record makers.
* “Mrs. R” was ineligible for the movie industry’s Academy Awards because it hadn’t been intended solely for The Graduate.
* Plus a Soviet intelligence agent, though that wasn’t known at the time.
* However, they stopped short of acknowledging the existence of Tom and Je
rry or the specifics of what or who caused the break.
* The Jewish-owned independent label that introduced Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Chuck Berry, and virtually all of blues and rhythm and blues culture to the world from the mid-1940s, providing a musical education to the teenage Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, and all who would follow them—which adds up to nearly the entire scope of rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues from the 1960s onward.
* Not counting “The Boxer,” which had been released as a single the previous spring.
* Which could be the story of a grown-up, postlarcenous version of the footloose antihero in “Somewhere They Can’t Find Me.”
* Excepting the final verse of “El Condor Pasa.”
* The back cover, sure, but it’s the portrait of McCartney, his baby daughter tucked into his winter coat, that pops into your mind when you think about the album.
* Muscle Shoals, like most of northern Alabama in those days, was in a dry county.
* The Dixie Hummingbirds recorded for Bess and Ike Merenstein at Apollo Records in the late 1940s.
Homeward Bound Page 52
